


nothing good starts in a getaway car

by kathillards



Category: Kamen Rider Decade
Genre: M/M, amnesia issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 14:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13148151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: His earliest memory of Tsukasa is a shadow in a throne room.  —- Daiki, and being in love with an amnesiac king of evil.





	nothing good starts in a getaway car

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mcmeekin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcmeekin/gifts).



> last month i told kat this was the perfect song for the decade ot4 and she told me to shut the fuck up.
> 
> takes place mostly during the series and after the all riders vs. dai shocker movie. does not include the series finale or the decade/w movie or sht1 or...whatever else tsukasa is in. if it did, it would have been sadder probably.

**nothing good starts in a getaway car**

_don’t pretend it’s such a mystery  
think about the place where you first met me_

—taylor swift, getaway car

.

His earliest memory of Tsukasa is a shadow in a throne room. The light crowns his silhouette; Daiki slinks around the chair and reaches for the gun--

"I wouldn't," says the leader of Dai Shocker. His voice is soft and echoes around the room, filling it with his presence. When Daiki looks at him, he's only a tall, lean figure in the center of his empire, no guards and no defenses.

"I'm not a big fan of doing what I'm supposed to do," Daiki says lightly, and aims the gun at him. "You're alone."

He steps into the light. His hair is dark and curls up at the ends, which is the first thing Daiki notices. The second is that he looks young, and handsome, and somehow amused. He tilts his head and observes Daiki carefully, and the DiEnd driver clutched in his hands, and seems to judge him worthy of some hidden reward.

"So are you," he says. "If I let you go, what would you do with it?"

Daiki shrugs and weighs the driver in his hands. "Steal more shit. I'm not here to topple your little evil empire, my lord."

"Not a good reason," he muses. "But not the worst."

"Are you gonna let me go or do we have to dance?" Daiki asks, just annoyed enough for a note of challenge to edge into his voice. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Tsukasa." He draws a card from his hip and holds it up. It's too dark for Daiki to see what's on it, but the air shifts around them, a warning of a coming storm. "Remember it."

.

He remembers it. He finds it funny that he's the only one who does, when he meets Tsukasa later and finds him wearing a hero's armor instead. His first thought is that he looks dumb, with his new hair style and absolutely no idea who he is or what he’s doing as Decade.

Daiki tells him so, one night after a fight he’d helped them with so he could steal something while they were distracted, and Tsukasa looks at him oddly.

“It’s my hair that’s dumb?” He lifts a hand to touch his hair wonderingly, running a finger down one of the braids he has today and Daiki has to resist the urge to do the same.

“Everything about you is dumb,” he says instead, checking his pocket to make sure the watch he’d snagged is there. It’s not. “Give it back.”

“Tell me how you know me.”

Daiki doesn’t think Tsukasa is quite ready for that conversation. He stalks closer, lips curling, and Tsukasa steps backwards. The battle has left him feeling equal parts exhausted and spiked up on adrenaline, and looking at Tsukasa only exacerbates both feelings. He’s halfway to being mad when he backs Tsukasa up into the side of the photography studio.

“You don’t want to know,” he says, rolling the words out slowly so they sink into Tsukasa’s head beneath all that dumb hair. “Trust me on that.”

Tsukasa meets his gaze, eyes dark as the glow of the street lamps dances off his cheekbones. “Hard to trust a thief.” He catches Daiki’s hand where it had been about to slip into his pocket and draws it back out meaningfully.

Daiki smirks. “You’re getting better at this.”

“Or you’re getting worse.”

Tsukasa traces his thumb up the side of his palm, from wrist to fingertip, so slowly that Daiki can’t move under his touch, his feet anchored to the ground by Tsukasa’s gravity. It’s unfair, he thinks, that even without his memories, Tsukasa can be so magnetic, so much the person he had been the first time Daiki had seen him—

Daiki makes a noise low in his throat and uses the momentum of Tsukasa’s hand to shove him backwards into the wall. The photography studio seems to shake with the impact of his body, but Tsukasa’s gaze doesn’t move from Daiki’s face, utterly fixated, and wondering, and hungry.

He’s not sure which of them moves first. Only that it ends the same way every time: a kiss like broken sparks, sputtering out of control, and Tsukasa’s lips, and his hands, and a touch that knows him a little too well to belong to an amnesiac.

But when he pulls back, Tsukasa looks only confused, no moment of realization, at the awareness of how well their bodies meld together.

“Have we done this before?” Tsukasa’s voice is just a little on the edge of breathless, and Daiki would feel smug about it if he weren’t so angry that Tsukasa doesn’t remember.

“No,” he lies, his voice rough and with the oddest edge of emotion to it, and snags his stolen watch from Tsukasa’s pocket before he can blink. “Go back home, Tsukasa.”

He doesn’t know how to tell him that ‘home’ was once a throne room bathed in darkness and not a photography studio full of laughter. He doesn’t know how to feel now that it’s not. He doesn’t stick around to watch Tsukasa leave again, doesn’t know how to say that last time, he’d been the one who left.

.

It’s Natsumi who corners him, months later, and wrangles at least part of the truth from him. He doesn’t know how she does it—maybe the fear of those damn pressure points—but when she finds him sitting on her couch and brings him a bowl of soup, he only hesitates a moment before taking it.

“You know who Tsukasa was before this, right?” she asks him casually, leaning against the table and watching him drink from the bowl of soup.

Daiki grunts in response. The soup is good, but not good enough for him to deal with this conversation.

“Must be hard,” Natsumi muses, tilting her head up to look at the ceiling instead of him. This gives him the opportunity to study her, to try and figure out her ulterior motivations for this, but he finds nothing. “To know him and not be able to say anything.”

“What makes you think I gave a damn about who he was before this?” he asks, mutinously spooning the soup into his mouth. His stomach churns, not from the taste but from the truth of her words.

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t,” she says, and her eyes are wide and brown and terribly sharp when she meets his gaze again. “I’m not asking you to tell me.”

“Good.” He takes another spoonful and marvels at how Tsukasa had managed to find the one girl in all the worlds who could see right through the both of them. “Because I’m not telling you.”

Natsumi stares at him for a moment, and then her gaze shifts away, to the window behind him. He’s almost grateful for the lack of pressure, though he’d never admit she has the capability to make him feel so nervous and untethered.

“It must have been really bad,” she says quietly. “For you to keep it a secret.”

Daiki looks down at his almost-empty bowl of soup and can’t help the small, helpless snort that escapes him. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It must have been.”

.

Tsukasa isn’t angry at him, but the way he trails his hand down the side of Daiki’s bare, half-bandaged chest makes him think he kind of is. There’s a stuttering to the touch of his fingers, a painful sort of nervousness.

Daiki flinches away. “I’ll be fine.”

Tsukasa doesn’t say anything, just looks at him. He hates how, despite his blank memory, there’s so much knowing in Tsukasa’s eyes, how they pierce through him and shatter all his carefully-laid defenses.

“Natsumi will kill me if I let you leave like this,” is all Tsukasa says. Daiki opens his mouth to make a smart remark, and then Tsukasa digs his fingers into his ribs—hard—and he groans at the jolt of pain. “See?”

“Shut up,” Daiki snaps. “I’ve been through worse.”

“Mm.” Tsukasa is so much quieter on nights like these, after the battle when the fight has been bled out of him. Daiki had watched him during dinner, how he’d let Yusuke chatter away in his ear without once making fun of him, and wondered what it had been that had so unsettled the destroyer of worlds like this.

Now he knows. Tsukasa trails his fingers around to his back, presses into the small of it, where there’s a bruise already forming, and Daiki grits his teeth against the pain. The way Tsukasa touches him, half-curious and half-reverential, wondering if he’d ever done this before, perhaps knowing on a base level that he had—it ignites some old ache inside Daiki that has nothing to do with his current wounds.

“I think that’s _fine_ ,” Daiki says, or starts to say, or tries to say, but he’s not sure how many of the words he manages to get out of his mouth before Tsukasa’s lips are on his.

He does pride himself on being two steps ahead of everyone else, but somehow, he’d gotten distracted with the bruises, and Tsukasa’s long fingers on his skin, and forgotten—he’d forgotten how close they were, how dangerous it is to be so close to Tsukasa lately. His lips part into the kiss on instinct and Tsukasa takes the opening with a desperate sort of desire.

Daiki doesn’t necessarily think all the desire is for him. There’s an element of searching to the way Tsukasa kisses him, his deep-seated longing to know more, as if he can swallow the answers about his past straight from Daiki’s mouth and into his own.

He pushes Tsukasa away, carefully. “That’s enough,” he mutters, and he doesn’t mean for it to sound so cold but it does.

.

Yusuke is sitting on the front steps of the building he’s just robbed, smiling cheerfully at him as he slips out of a side door to make his escape. It’s barely twilight, and it’s barely been a week since he last saw Tsukasa and his misfit crew, and they haven’t run into a monster yet in this world, so he has no idea what this is about.

He doesn’t like not knowing things. Especially about someone as easy to read as Yusuke Onodera.

“Good haul?” Yusuke asks, leaning back on his hands. He looks remarkably sunny, even in the fading light of dusk.

Daiki stops on the same step as Yusuke and cocks his head. “You here to talk me out of it?”

Yusuke shakes his head. “When has that ever worked?”

Daiki smirks and allows himself to sit down next to Yusuke, though he keeps his stash of stolen objects out of his reach. “Then why are you here? And where are the others?”

He had, of course, scanned the entire place for Tsukasa before going in, and he doesn’t think Tsukasa would be able to surprise him on such a basic heist, but stranger things have happened. And he hadn’t expected Yusuke.

“You mean where’s Tsukasa?” Yusuke looks at him meaningfully. Daiki rolls his eyes and refuses to answer. “They’re at home. Grandpa’s making dinner, if you want some.”

“I already ate,” he dismisses. It’s not strictly true, and what he’d eaten probably doesn’t count as dinner, but he can think of no reason to subject himself to Tsukasa’s company so soon after rejecting him.

He’s about to get up to leave, but Yusuke is still staring at him, his brow slightly crinkled as if he’s trying to figure Daiki out. The idea that he could is irritating, and yet Daiki can’t help the feeling that Yusuke can see him better than he thinks.

“You should stop avoiding him,” says Yusuke, so simply and matter-of-factly that Daiki has to run it through his brain a few times to comprehend what he’s saying.

“Just because we fight together sometimes doesn’t mean I have to listen to you,” Daiki says, but he doesn’t make the grand exit he wants to, instead just sits there and pretends not to be affected by Yusuke’s gaze heavy on him. “I’m not avoiding him.”

“Then come to dinner,” Yusuke says, and he smiles as if this is at all a fair offer.

Daiki snorts and pushes himself to his feet. “Maybe next time.”

Yusuke follows him up. “Something happened, right? That’s why you two are being so weird?”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Daiki, a bit more sharply than he had intended.

“I’m not worried about it, I’m worried about _you_.”

The open, earnest way Yusuke says this, as if it’s the easiest truth in the world to give voice to, has Daiki freezing. In all these worlds, Tsukasa had never quite learned to be so honest and Natsumi might say it with her eyes but not with her words. But Yusuke stands in from of him, unarmed, unwilling to move or be moved, and stares him down until Daiki feels the faintest stirrings of guilt inside his stomach.

“You shouldn’t worry about me,” he says finally, voice low.

“Maybe.” Yusuke smiles again, and god, Daiki wishes he would stop smiling for once. Just make it easier to be mean to him. “But I do anyway. You know you’re welcome at the photography studio, no matter what happened with you and Tsukasa, right?”

Daiki switches his gaze to a spot over Yusuke’s shoulder. “Did you clear that with Natsumi?”

“Just think about it, all right?” Yusuke claps him on the shoulder and moves past him, down the stairs. “Dinner’s at eight.”

He doesn’t go to dinner, but he does at least go out and get himself some proper food, and tells himself he’s not doing it just so Natsumi and Yusuke won’t worry.

.

When the dam finally breaks and Tsukasa remembers, Daiki is only a little embarrassed to find himself hiding from him yet again after the battle with all the other Riders. Tsukasa hadn’t said anything to him, about him, about _them_ , but he can feel the shift in the air nonetheless, the way every accidental brush of their arms has so much more weight to it.

He hates it, the unease crawling up his skin, how he can’t predict what Tsukasa might be feeling or thinking—how he’s gotten used to knowing him in a new way, knowing Tsukasa as Decade, as a hero, and how this has rearranged their relationship, twisted it right back to where it was in those long-gone days on Tsukasa’s world before Daiki had left and he’d lost his memories.

“You’re very good at running,” Tsukasa says, when he finds Daiki standing outside the photography studio and staring at the door like he wants to come in. He has no idea how Tsukasa had known he was out here. He doesn’t ask.

“I’m not running,” he lies. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Tsukasa crosses his arms and looks at him. He hadn’t been there when that gaze had gone cold and distant, but he had been there when Natsumi had been shaking and scared from it, and her quiet hurt and pain had absorbed into him anyhow.

“You knew,” says Tsukasa quietly. When Daiki looks at him, there’s still an element of guilt to his gaze. Guilt isn’t an emotion Tsukasa wears well, but he supposes it’s impossible to avoid in both of them right now.

“I did,” he agrees. “Now you know why I couldn’t tell you.”

Tsukasa nods slowly. “You were afraid it would trigger me back to being evil, if you told me.”

Daiki stops and swallows. “Yeah,” he says, hoarsely. “That.”

“I remember,” says Tsukasa, voice low and careful. “Meeting you in the throne room. You stole that driver from me.”

“That driver was made to keep you in check.” Daiki lifts it out and weighs it in his hands. “It might still have to.”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” Tsukasa says, and Daiki slides the gun back into his pocket and looks at him in surprise. “If you had to use it.”

“We’ll see,” says Daiki, because there’s still that whole Destroyer of Worlds thing to deal with later. “Don’t do anything stupid and I won’t have to.”

Tsukasa smirks at him and looks, finally, more like Decade than Dai Shocker. “When have I ever done anything stupid?”

“You just tried to take over the world,” Daiki reminds him.

Tsukasa uncrosses his arms and rolls his eyes, jerking his head towards the door behind him. “You coming in for the night or what?”

“Guess so,” says Daiki, casually, as if this isn’t important at all, but Tsukasa’s arm brushes his as he walks up to the doorstep and it’s just enough of a shift back to what he’d wanted that he thinks he might stay for more than one night this time.


End file.
